Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

After about two weeks of development, Dusk Software is ready to announce our October Challenge game, Aegis!

Aegis is the in-development title of our upcoming tower defense variant. Gameplay focuses on deck building between maps to prepare and setup which towers and effects will be available in game. Cards are acquired through in game currency awarded at the end of maps as well as drops from boss creep.

While the game isn’t close to being done yet, we have put up an alpha build on our website and added a donation button. We’ve already received well over $1, so I figure that it counts. 😉

Here is a heavily cropped screenshot of our Paypal account page as proof:

I figured now that I’m done rating everyone’s game, I’d sit down and write up a little post-mortem for my game, Cave Dangerous. Cave Dangerous is a fun little exploratory platformer with a minimalist inventory system. I had lots of fun creating it for the Ludum Dare 15 competition.

The good

I actually finished this time! The last Ludum Dare I was in (Roads), I did not finish due to some unfamiliarity with AS3, among other issues and time constraints. So, yay for finishing!

Even though I did suffer through a short internet outage, I managed to make good use of that offline time to work on some pixel sprites for the game, which really helped to set the artistic “vision” for Cave Dangerous.

First time using Visual Studio in a compo, and it was quite enjoyable. Well, except for some major deployment issues (see below)

The Bad

Originally planned to do something in 3D, but was feeling uninspired facing the modeller. Also, a quick test revealed my .obj loader was (again) not working correctly. So, scrapped that idea.

As with every platformer I’ve made for a compo, I spent too much time tweaking / fixing the jumping and collision code. I think in the future, I’ll see about preparing some basic tile-based collision code ahead of time so I can focus more on the actual game.

This was my first time trying Visual Studio with a compo entry, and it was very enjoyable up until I had to package it up to release it. I ended up almost pulling my hair out in frustration (why do I have to package a C++ redistributable? argh!). A website that I found (here: http://llbit.se/?p=19) explains pretty much exactly what happened to me. I ended up using mingw32 to compile the exe, which worked perfectly. Sheesh.

Didn’t have enough time to add an explosion sound effect for the bomb. Apparently this is what most people complained about (aside from the length of the game) judging by the comments I got from the ratings.

As another “behind the scenes look”, here are some pics of the miner before I settled on the final image:

I got it in about 10 minutes late due to some stupid MSVS bugs. For some reason, the player disappears when running in Release Mode instead of Debug Mode, what the heck?

I spent a bit of time near the beginning setting up an MVC in the code, but towards the end it kind of fell apart, which is what I was expecting.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with the game. I wish I had more time to work on sound and add some music. Of course, it would have been nicer to spend more time on expanding the levels and caves too. As you might be able to guess, I had originally planned being able to buy and aquire different items, including different pickaxes, etc.

In retrospect, the game turned out quite a bit like La-Mulana, which totally wasn’t my intention. Oops.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it! It was certainly fun to make. I love Ludum Dare.

Hello! This is my little miner guy that I’ve been working on pretty much all morning, but now I have a decent walk cycle for him (at least I think it’s pretty decent)

Last night I got a level loader done that’ll read data from a bitmap file to construct a tile-based level. Still no screenshots yet… I hope I can get my vision into something playable before the 48 hours are up. Ho ho!

My Internet was down for about 4 hours this morning. Yikes! It actually helped me focus on working on the sprite. Woo.